Basic EAI Tasks

This post will give you quite a good idea about how siebel integrates with external systems.

Before actually going for integration , you should be clear with following:

1. External data to bring into the Siebel application and the Siebel data to send to the external application.
2. Mapping between Siebel field names with external field names
3. Transformations to match Siebel data structures to external data structures such as Contact in siebel might be customers in external system.
4. Exchange format such as XML
5. Transport to use between applications such as IBM MQSeries , File Transport , HTTP , MicrosoftMSMQ etc
6. Volume of data
7. Approaches for integration

• Export Siebel Data
• Synchronize Siebel and External Data
• Displaying Siebel data in external application
• Displaying external Data in siebel without replicating same in siebel

8. Integration Strategies

• Workflow for EAI
• Enterprise Integration Manager (EIM)
• Virtual Business Components
• Web Services
• Object Interfaces such as COM Objects etc

While deciding on strategies , we often get confused what to do , below diagram will help you to decide same.

I will be discussing about strategies in detail in next sessions.